


Coming Home

by the_Dark_Weird_Way7



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-01
Updated: 2014-06-01
Packaged: 2018-01-27 21:16:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1722797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_Dark_Weird_Way7/pseuds/the_Dark_Weird_Way7
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos the Scientist finally escapes the House That Doesn't Exist and goes home to find his life in tatters at the hands of StrexCorp.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coming Home

Getting out of that never ending hell hole was difficult, but Carlos finally made it out of the House That Doesn't Exist. And for the first time in what seemed like forever, he was going back home.  
Carlos half-shuffled, half-limped through Night Vale and found that the desert town was mysteriously empty and quiet. No one but the scientist walked through the streets under the late afternoon sun. Where is everyone? he wondered, ducking into an alley as a bright yellow van with a disturbingly happy face painted on the side roared through the street. Was this some kind of Night Vale holiday he hadn't been made aware of? Was it Street Cleaning Day again? Or, god forbid, Arbor Day?  
Whatever it was, Carlos knew he had to get home and find out what was going on.  
By the time he made it back to the apartment, the sun was descending over the horizon, and he could see a bedroom light illuminating his and Cecil's window. Though his body was racked with exhaustion and starvation, Carlos was delirious with joy to finally be out of that eternal desert and back to the place he'd been dreaming about for who knows how long. To hell with food or water. The only thing Carlos wanted was to have Cecil back in his arms and to hear his low voice tell him everything would be alright.  
But when he raced up the steps and got to the front door, he found Cecil wasn’t there.  
In fact, the entire apartment had been torn apart. Clothes were tossed everywhere. Furniture was toppled over, and lay splintered and in pieces. Broken glass beakers and lab equipment littered the floor… The picture Carlos had taken of Cecil the night after the incident at the Desert Flower Bowling Alley & Arcade Fun Complex lay shattered and ripped in half in the bedroom.

On the wall over the bed in bright yellow spray paint were the words, STREXCORP SYNERNISTS INC. BELIEVE IN A SMILING GOD.

Carlos knew this wasn’t the result of a weekly citizen inspection from the Sheriff’s Secret Police. This was much bigger, much more dangerous. Despite his allergies, Carlos looked to Khoshekh’s bed, since the formerly floating cat from the station’s men’s restroom was the last piece of Cecil he had to hold on to for now. But even the cat was gone, signs of struggle evident in the claw marks on the blanket and the small blots of blood here and there mingling with patches of black cat fur.

Carlos’s heart deflated. Then his phone rang. A small blip of hope moved through his stomach that maybe, just maybe, it was Cecil. Anxiously, he answered the call. “Cecil?” he croaked, his throat sore from dehydration and the oncoming threat of tears.

But it wasn’t Cecil. It was Steve Carlsburg. His voice was panicked and his words were barely coherent amidst the sobbing. "Carlos! Thank god, I've been trying to call you for hours! I need to know if you've seen Janice. Please, Carlos. She hasn’t been home in two days, and we can’t find her anywhere! I think she went to the Parade. I told her not to, but she wouldn't listen... Is she there with you and Cecil? Please, Carlos, I'm desperate…”

Steve continued asking about Janice, but Carlos didn’t hear the rest. He couldn’t hear anything at all. He didn’t even hear Old Woman Josie and her totally not real angels come in through the busted front door.

Janice was gone…

Khoshekh was gone…

But most importantly, Cecil was gone.

His perfectly perfect Cecil… was gone, taken by a malevolent corporation with unknown plans.

The world was much darker than it was when he left to explore the house.

Josie put a soft, wrinkled hand on Carlos’s shoulder. He looked back to see her holding a small recorder with her forefinger on the play button.

"You didn’t hear, did you?" she asked sadly.

He could only shake his head.

She clicked the play button, and Carlos listened to Cecil’s last broadcast. He heard the great joy for Tamika’s rebellion, the terrible sorrow for the town’s inaction, that defeated tone, the terror when station management walked in, and then… the silence.

When the broadcast ended with the click of the play button, Carlos could only stare at the yellow spray paint over the bed, the same bed where he and Cecil used to converse about the newest near-catastrophe to hit the town or some scientific discovery he had found at the lab or speculation over who was going to be the next mayor.

"After they took him," Josie explained as Erika floated to Khoshekh's bed, "they came here for you. They tore the place to hell trying to find you. All they found was poor Khoshekh. That cat put up a good fight, spitting poison at the StrexCorp. employees and screeching them into another dimension altogether, but they finally got him down and..." She didn't finish, and really, there was no need to. 

Deep down in his angry and broken heart, Carlos knew what he had to do. He knew that somewhere out there, Cecil was being held by StrexCorp. He knew they had done something to Janice and Khoshekh. He knew he was going to be hunted down next. And he knew he would have to save his perfect Cecil from the terror that was StrexCorp… but for now, the only thing he could do was collapse to his knees as Josie cried silently behind him.  
It was a wonder the world didn’t crash to the floor with him.


End file.
